Get a fingernail or knife blade under the stinger sac and flick it away, or the muscles inside will keep pumping venom. Stung once during a portion of her lesson in hive-keeping, she even used the incident to show how to remove a stinger: Pull the dead bee away without squeezing it. But she dropped the bonnet by the second inspection, smoking her face to keep bees from considering her either a nuisance or tasty.
Rupert, one of six state hive inspectors, wore a protective bonnet to inspect the first hives because she wasn’t sure what to expect, and because she wanted to demonstrate good beekeeping habits. Carrying it in their “pollen baskets,” the insects drop a little here and there to cross-pollinate, making it possible for you to eat, and then carry the rest back to their hives to feed new larvae and to produce honey.īy now, their queens should have mated with a few scores of drones and drawn wax into comb-like chambers for the incubation of larvae.īut that isn’t always what Rupert found in her inspection of domestic hives at the country home of Phil and Linda Edwards - although one hive had been found in the woods and rebuilt and stocked with bees - and at one domestic and one wild-bee hive belonging to Jim Norfleet, in a field on the edge of Laurinburg. Right now, it’s pollen season, time for bees to cover themselves in the stuff that makes you wish you’d bought stock in Kleenex. But disease still can destroy that, as can an infestation of beetles or an ineffective queen. “Busy” generally means “fed,” which keeps the queen fat and happy and the workers working. “If you don’t keep ‘em busy, they start up trouble.” “Bees are like teenagers,” she told the swarm of beekeepers in white suits of varying shades of cleanliness. Some hives evidenced “excellent laying patterns” by the queen while others revealed spotty laying patterns, showing the queen was aging or, possibly, diseased. In some cases, she told the Richmond and Scotland County beekeepers Saturday, she didn’t like what she found. SCOTLAND COUNTY - As honeybees dive-bombed the white-clad aliens surrounding their homes last weekend, state bee inspector Nancy Rupert deftly pulled apart a handful of hives to show two counties’ worth of field-tripping beekeepers how apiaries should look this time of year.
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